WHO IS SPEAKING?
Cell phones ring careless little tunes
downloaded at a cost of beauty, 2€,
sad services, from a website found
during the passing of whole distracted hours.
Who is speaking?
There’s constant risk of being pissed,
moderated by the illusion that a call,
certainly next, might change our lives.
Who is speaking?
We press the green button, abandoned to the illusion,
never aware of the irreparability of our ill-fated action.
Who is speaking?
No one.
From the acoustics emerge the noises of dead souls,
saved by cheap rates from outcomes of ill fate,
claiming insistent attention,
with the knife between the teeth.
PERIPHERAL BALLADEER
I can finally stop calling myself a poet,
not creating in hendecasyllables,
loosened in the acid, caustic, of my intuitions.
I create in the vernacular, measuring on no meter
the fragments secreted by the conflagration of existences,
Giovanni beheaded, and landed on two wheels in front,
in front of the clamoring sirens of the fire brigade,
in front of the ironic muzzle of a dog met in a courtyard,
in front of the assenting silences of the walls of an urban cemetery,
in front of the shouts of owner and editorial director,
in front of a walk among the currents of a warehouse,
in front of the certainty of needing no one.
A poet? No. Thank you.
I feel a balladeer, a writer of disgrace,
yielding every victory to souls never sated,
of honors, and of crowns, gathered face-down for the crown.
INVERTED VERSES
We do not sing of grassy mantles
dampened by a fine morning mist;
in our inverted verses
there lie stretches of synthetic turf,
reeking of pollution fumes.
We do not sing of smiling hills
warmed by the gentle sun of a gentle autumn;
in our inverted verses
there stand mounds of organic waste
piled in the middle of a road.
The stairs descend, catching junkies
in the act of shooting up,
with the indifference of being different,
to the rhythms of discounted music
from shopping malls.
We do not sing of crystal seas intent
on cradling boats with the sweet roll of waves;
in our inverted verses there are water tanks
from fire-suppression systems,
brimming with mosquitoes and sludge.
We do not sing of charming little girls
busy arranging their blond curls;
in our inverted verses
there are prostitutes beaten into soliciting
on the outskirts of urban sprawl.
We descend
into Paradise,
aedo Narcissus:
do not make a racket,
I will hold your hand.
MEOWING IN A CORNER
To the moon, saddened by blue clouds,
a celestial wall of a room,
I raise laments, faint meows of a furious brute,
against the crows hidden in the ivy,
against the worms concealed in the saucers
of Italian criticism.
A cat that roars at the moon, meowing in a dark corner,
without the courage to be a beast thirsty for flesh,
without the destiny to be a predator hungry for verse,
you find me thus, on spiteful evenings,
on harsh evenings of fluorescent anguish.
Hissing at enemies, ghosts, myself,
I lift lullabies, at times off-key,
from my left eye,
awaiting catatonic clashes,
love quarrels,
as a castrated sovereign.
A cat that roars at the moon, meowing in a corner
of a darkroom, unknown to all, unknown to everything,
chased across balconies stained with eviction,
intent on disturbing the sleep of those
who live by begging.
PRISONERS OF THE PRESENT
Prisoners of the present,
peeling the knuckles of our fingers,
bouncing off the chewing-gum walls of art,
wearying ourselves in the aisles of warehouses,
running, in vain, on the treadmills of fitness,
between fashion stores and discount shopping,
always, or sometimes, searching for what we had,
what we will have, or what we should have had.
Everyday life is a refundable emptiness,
rented out, to non-EU citizens, at fair rates,
it is overcrowded: dozens of individuals in a room,
with no chance to step down,
to compromise,
or at least to reduce the distance
between frenzied screams and tone-deaf voices.
Prisoners of the present, with no way out,
laboratory hamsters stimulated by mass-media anxiety,
we gamble on loves so vast they could feed oceans of mosquitoes,
and spray ourselves with hectoliters of Autan,
struggling to survive ourselves
until we wear out completely.
Ivan Pozzoni was born in Monza in 1976. He introduced Law and Literature in Italy and the publication of essays on Italian philosophers and on the ethics and juridical theory of the ancient world; He collaborated with several Italian and international magazines. Between 2007 and 2024, different versions of the books were published: Underground and Riserva Indiana, with A&B Editrice, Versi Introversi, Mostri, Galata morente, Carmina non dant damen, Scarti di magazzino, Qui gli austriaci sono più severi dei Borboni, Cherchez la troika e La malattia invettiva con Limina Mentis, Lame da rasoi, with Joker, Il Guastatore, with Cleup, Patroclo non deve morire, with deComporre Edizioni, Kolektivne NSEAE and Lo Stato Pontificio with Divinafollia. It contains a fortnight of autogérées socialistes edition houses. He wrote 152 volumes, wrote 1000 essays, founded an avant-garde movement (NéoN-avant-gardisme, approved by Zygmunt Bauman), and wrote an Anti-manifesto NéoN-Avant-gardiste. His verses are translated into 30 languages. In 2024, after six years of total retrait of academic studies, he return to the italian artistic world and melts the NSEAE Kolektivne (New socio/ethno/aesthetic anthropology) [https://kolektivnenseae.wordpress.com/], the legal “armed” wing of Italian literary latemodernism.